Parents Get a Share in the Running of L.A. Schools

There was something new and something familiar about the gathering of Westside parents, joined by a sprinkling of teachers and principals, at Webster Junior High School in West Los Angeles last weekend.

The new: the Los Angeles Unified School District’s “shared decision-making councils.” The panels, composed of teachers, principals, parents and community members, are being formed at each school in the district this fall, and the meeting was a combination workshop and pep rally for those interested in seeking council seats in the school-by-school elections that begin on Tuesday.

The familiar: the faces in the crowd. Most of the 160 or so people who showed up were elementary school parents already active in PTAs and other school organizations. School board member Mark Slavkin, who organized the workshop, acknowledged that these parents will, in all likelihood, fill most of the community-representative seats on the councils.

The councils were a key concession won by the teachers after their strike last spring. They are expected to have an active voice in many aspects of school policy that until now have been the realm of principals and administrators, including student discipline, spending, scheduling of exams and activities, staff training programs and use of school equipment.

“It’s a new era in the Los Angeles Unified School District,” Helen Bernstein, United Teachers-Los Angeles vice president, said at the Saturday morning workshop.

Under the terms of the contract, half of the members of each council will be teachers. The other half will be composed of parents, other community representatives, principals, non-teaching school employees and, at the high schools, one student.

Parents and others who live or work within a school’s enrollment boundaries are eligible to vote and run for the unpaid, one-year parent/community seats. Nominations can be made as late as the election meetings at the schools.

Team Building

“A school community that has not worked together effectively will benefit enormously by building a team,” said Slavkin. Schools that already work extensively with their community, he predicted, “will take off--the sky’s the limit.”

Although other urban school districts in the country have experimented with power-sharing arrangements and decentralized decision-making, the councils at the more than 800 regular and adult schools and children’s centers in the Los Angeles district are the most ambitious effort anywhere to give teachers and parents more control in school management, school district officials say.

Each council will have six to 16 members, depending on the level of the school and its number of students. Districtwide, there will be about 14,000 representatives and alternates. The task of teaching them parliamentary procedure and how to read a school budget will be accomplished by training a few members of each council, whose mission will be to pass on the knowledge to the rest, said Andy Cazares, assistant superintendent in charge of school-based management.

Cazares said each council member will also receive a glossary that attempts to explain district acronyms and some of the terms that might otherwise sound like gobbledygook to non-educators on the panels.

The councils will not take the place of bilingual advisory councils and other committees that are required by law. In contrast to PTAs and advisory councils, their decisions will be binding on the school and the principal, who will not have veto power.

Although the councils’ power will be somewhat limited the first year, starting next year they will be able to levy changes in areas such as curriculum and hiring.

Staffing Decisions

“If an assistant principal retires, then (the council) will be able to decide, ‘We don’t want another administrator--instead, hire a teacher to reduce class size,’ ” Bernstein said, setting off applause from the audience.

In that second phase, called “school-based management,” each school will have the power to draft its own policies, as long as they provide for accountability and aim to improve student achievement. The policies must be submitted to the district-level central council for approval. The 24-seat central council consists of members appointed by the superintendent, school board and the teachers union, including Bernstein.

During the workshop, Bernstein, Cazares, Slavkin and other leaders touted the councils and urged parents to run for seats. In small discussion sessions, parents scribbled notes and sometimes seemed surprised by the descriptions of the novel system.

Pointing out the window to the building’s walls, Cazares told 35 parents in a classroom bungalow, “This school needs a paint job, badly.” Whereas now the school would be added to a list and the paint job might be “27 years away,” under school-based management, the school can “propose that (it go) to outside bidders” directly, he said.

“Are they going to allow that kind of thing?” said parent Sheila Teplin, shock on her face. In another group, a parent asked, “Is there an open mind to (this)?”

“You have to think big,” Cazares said. “(To) unleash the creativity that’s out there . . . we have to stop thinking of ourselves as in boxes.”

“It’s not the ‘they’ anymore, it’s ‘us,’ ” Marion Hogue, a parent and former teacher appointed to the central council by Slavkin, said to the other parents.

Tailored Decisions

By the end of the four-hour conference, many parents were pleased at the prospect of being able to tailor decisions to their own schools.

For example, parent Nancy Schwab, PTA treasurer at Mar Vista Elementary School, said that because enrollment at her school shot up by 200 children this year, she wanted to look into the cafeteria’s capacity and balancing of bilingual and regular classes.

Other parents said they wanted impose greater discipline, revamp textbook lists, improve special education or place new emphasis on reading and spelling skills.

Bernstein said the councils should also help modernize the schools. She urged parents to avoid envisioning the perfect school as “the school you attended. That’s 30 years ago for me. That’s not the schools today.”

Many interviewed at the conference predicted that the transition to the council system would be a smooth one. Parents from Mar Vista and Pacific Palisades elementary schools said there was already much cooperation and consultation among teachers, principals and parents.

Varied Responses

Principal Jack Moscowitz of University High School said he welcomed the council and did not regard it as a threat. Teacher Nancy Hermann, teachers union chair at 42nd Street School, said the principal there has had an open-door policy, but nonetheless, “to have six teachers spearheading a discipline plan is a whole different spirit.”

Rosemarie Bernier, a parent at Clover Avenue School, sounded a dissenting note. “Parents have not had that much input” at Clover Avenue, she said. “All ideas you have get shot down. . . . I don’t know how (the principal is) going to react to it, because she’s always been in control.”

Some parents and school officials urged expanded efforts to draw in broader parent and community involvement.

Sharon Fox, a parent, special education assistant and Mar Vista resident, said that many residents in her neighborhood who are not parents seemed unaware of the councils. “I have a feeling it’s going to be a popularity contest” among parents, she said of the elections.

Parents of Bused Students

Another under-represented group, school officials predicted, would be the parents of the 9,700 children who are bused from crowded central areas of Los Angeles to the Westside.

Distance deters their involvement, but “they need to know that the school wants participation from them,” said Marion McNair, whose children are bused from Leimert Park in Southwest Los Angeles to Mar Vista Elementary School.

District officials said the elections will be advertised on television and in newspapers. Notices in Spanish, Armenian, Chinese, Korean and English have been given to students to take home. The language barrier, however, may make it difficult for many parents to take part, because most or all of the councils will conduct their business in English.

Slavkin emphasized that it will take time for the system to work and for each school’s community to adjust to the councils’ power. And Bernstein warned that the new era will not bring instant improvement in student achievement.

Learning “how to get along with each other, how to use the Xerox machine, is not going to raise reading scores in the district,” Bernstein said. Test scores “are not going to go up in a year--we didn’t get into this mess in a year,” she said.

Parents agreed. “I’m realistic,” parent Sheila Teplin said. “You can’t change test scores (immediately), but you can change attitudes.”